Lost Eden
I've never been a prolific book reader, but I used to be a very passionate one. The books I did read and love, I cherished them like jewels, like children. It used to amaze me, that mere marks on pages joined together to create letters, then words, then sentences that evoke a full and living universe with characters and action and enormous ideas. It was just series of dashes and curves on paper, but through some sort of sorcery I still can't understand, those dashes and curves would surround me in a solid world where I would taste and smell and feel things there as I would in the real world. I remember seeing and feeling the bark of the trees in varous forests; I remember going into someone's room and seeing their notebook on their table with its too-neat handwriting; I remember the taste of porridge with maple sugar and I remember how the abyss look when a character fell into it and died.

I remember so many times putting the book down because the sensory overload was getting to be too much and being shocked that I was only in my room at my desk, or on the bus, or in the library. A few times I was shocked that there were sunlight coming through the windows because there was a large dark thunderstorm raging in the book, and once I remember being shocked that I could see because the main character was blind, and I was going through the world with only the other senses along with her.

I've been readng "Abhorsen" over the weekend. I haven't read a book in months, and I haven't truly experience a book the way I used to for much longer. I've read the first two books of the Abhorsen series back when a book would send me to another world, and they were fantastic, especially "Sabriel." I saw the Old Kingdom so clearly, and flew with her on the paper wings that absolutely enchanted me. "Abhorsen" so far is excellent, better than the second book, and I'd have to say that it's just as good as Sabriel. Now I wish I read it earlier, when I would have taken those dashs and curves and created a world so solid I would feel as wet and as tired as the characters are right now.

I have not lost the total ability to create a world (or is that I'm tranported in it? No, it's more that it surrounds me and takes over my senses). I still saw the river, still saw the clouds coming in at the distance, still felt the exhaustion of the characters, but the solidness is no longer there. It's transparent, all the way in the back of my mind instead of all around me, constantly superimposed by the interior view of the bus or subway I was riding, or the reading room in the library where I spent a few hours with the girls as we got some quiet reading done. Never once did I forget where I was. If I put the book down, it was because someone got on the bus, or the doors of the subway opened, or one of the girls flipped a page. I was so above the surface of the world of "Abhorsen" that every tiny thing took me out of it.

But as weak and transparents as they were, I did see the clouds and the river and the character, and after so long of not being able to read a book because all I would get were sentences and words, that was such a relief.